Category Archives: Free Speech

Gallup News: “Americans’ perceptions of news media bias have increased significantly over the past generation. Thirty-two percent believe the news media are careful to separate fact from opinion, well below the 58% who held this view in 1984. Meanwhile, 66% currently agree that most news media do not do a good job of letting people… Continue Reading

Freedom House – Freedom in the World 2018, Democracy in Crisis: “Democracy is in retreat globally and, some say, in the United States. Exacerbating the democratic backslide are authoritarian regimes such as Russia and China, which have increased both repression at home and efforts to export instability abroad. On the home front, indifference toward democratic… Continue Reading

LIS NEWS – Can you believe it’s almost 2018? That means it’s time to look back at some of the notable library-related stories from the past year. 10. Librarians Fight Fake News The problems with fake news caused many of us to revamp our web evaluation handouts into guides for spotting bogus information sources. 9.… Continue Reading

Americans agree that certain behaviors constitute online harassment, but they are more divided on others – “Pew Research Center surveys have found that online harassment is a common phenomenon in the digital lives of many Americans, and that a majority of Americans feel harassment online is a major problem. Even so, there is considerable debate… Continue Reading

The rise of female whistleblowers. Oxford Bibliographies. Andrea Hickerson. January 1, 2018. [Andrea Hickerson is the Director of the School of Communication and an Associate Professor at Rochester Institute of Technology.] “Until recently, I firmly believed whistleblowers would increasingly turn to secure, anonymizing tools and websites, like WikiLeaks, to share their data rather than take… Continue Reading

On December 14, 2017 the FCC voted to “roll back the 2015 rules that banned internet service providers from prioritizing certain internet traffic over others….[this has ended the] difference between a free and open online experience, and one where corporations dictate what you can see, and how fast you can see it. To understand the… Continue Reading

EFF: “One of the most pernicious forms of censorship in modern America is the abuse of the court system by corporations and wealthy individuals to harass, intimidate, and silence their critics. We use the term “Strategic Lawsuit Against Public Participation,” more commonly known as a “SLAPP,” to describe this phenomenon. With a SLAPP, a malicious… Continue Reading

“Jameel Jaffer, Executive Director of the Knight First Amendment Institute at Columbia University and former Deputy Legal Director for the ACLU, delivered the tenth annual Salant Lecture on Freedom of the Press at the Harvard Kennedy School’s Shorenstein Center on October 17, 2017, entitled “Government Secrecy in the Age of Information Overload.” Following is a… Continue Reading

Americans Say Political Correctness Has Silenced Discussions Society Needs to Have; Most Have Views They’re Afraid to Share “Nearly three-fourths (71%) of Americans believe that political correctness has done more to silence important discussions our society needs to have. A little more than a quarter (28%) instead believe that political correctness has done more to… Continue Reading

Columbia Journalism Review – “This week, following an incendiary tweet by President Trump toward North Korea, Twitter is making an update to its terms of service. The social media company will now consider newsworthiness alongside its other criteria in determining whether to allow speech on its platform…By deciding what is newsworthy, Twitter will effectively be… Continue Reading

The web is not as open as it once was, with nation-states exerting their power over the internet: “…Facebook encapsulates the reasons for the internet’s fragmentation — and increasingly, its consequences. The company has become so far-reaching that more than two billion people — about a quarter of the world’s population — now use Facebook… Continue Reading

Subscribe to our Mailing List

Follow beSpacific

Searchable Database – Over 45,000 Postings

Searchable database of over 45,000 postings!

Support beSpacific

Research updates provided daily since 2002, with an emphasis on primary sources.

Awards for BeSpacific

American Bar Association

BeSpacific: “No one better has her finger on the pulse of the legal information world than Sabrina Pacifici, law librarian and author of the blog BeSpacific,” writes blogger Robert Ambrogi. “Launched in 2002, BeSpacific is one of the longest-running legal blogs and, remarkably, Sabrina seems more prolific today than ever. She posts multiple items every day, covering the gamut of law, technology and knowledge discovery and topics ranging from cybersecurity to legal research to government regulation to civil liberties to IP and more. For me, BeSpacific is one of my daily must-reads and has been for 14 years straight.”

Pages

LLRX

Sabrina is also the solo Editor, Publisher and Founder of LLRX.com® – Legal, technology and knowledge discovery resources on the “moving edge” for Librarians, Lawyers, Researchers, Academic and Public Interest Communities – launched in 1996.